This package provides a personal protal for RSS syndicated newsfeeds. The goal of this project was to provide myself with a personal portal off of my website that I can go to when I want to catch up on a number of sites I like to read during the day. Instead of visiting all these places, I can go to one page and see if there are any interesting stores that have recently been posted.

One inspiration for all this was a recent Slashdot article on how RSS feeds may replace mailing lists because of spam and the subsequent discussion on RSS readers. This tidaka.com/board posting on b2 and RSS pointed me in the direction of a PHP class for RSS. The fase4 RDF class is the basis of this package.

One remaining question was how one manages the RSS links in a reasonable way. A database, of course, is probably the best way to do this, and Mike Little’s b2 Links hack was perfect for the job. b2rss_viewer looks for its RSS feed names and URLS based on a link category in the b2 Links database. As coded, the category has to be named ‘RDF’, but this is trivial to change.

One quibble with the whole thing: a lot of the blogs I read are based on Blogspot/Blogger, which doesn’t have RSS feeds for the bulk of the blogs. It’s unfortunate. I’ve had to leave the Blogger entries available on the right sidebar instead of moving them into the link manager/rss viewer setup. A few of the other blogs with RSS feeds also provide relatively poor feeds, in particular Instapundit and ScienceBlog. Oh, well. Presumably the feeds will improve over time as RSS becomes more widely used.

Posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2003 at 11:31 am and is filed under The Blog Itself.
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